Thanks to RCMP documents, allegations of dirty deeds related to the Senate expense scandal continue to grow. Voters may not be paying attention now, but the diligence of police efforts means an ugly reckoning is in the cards.

Stephen Harper may have an unhappy surprise waiting for him when Parliament’s break ends and he has to get back to mistreating the House of Commons. The Senate expenses scandal, which he has been able to ignore for most of the summer, may be waiting for him.

Investigators poring through Duffy’s expense claims from the 2011 election suggest that he billed the red chamber for per diems and flights while campaigning for at least 11 Conservative candidates across the country. The claims were sometimes for himself, but at least two claims involved travel for Duffy and his wife, say the RCMP.

Lead investigator Cpl. Greg Horton writes in the court document filed Thursday that Duffy claimed per diems — valued at $86.35 per day — and almost $6,000 in travel on days when he was on the campaign trail and not in Ottawa because the Senate wasn’t sitting.[/np_storybar]

The country may doze, but this is one scandal that doesn’t sleep. In what may be the quietest days of the news cycle’s quietest months, the Senate is busily generating new revelations of ugly allegations. And next week a fresh chapter opens, when the long-awaited report on expense claims by Sen. Pamela Wallin finally lands on the desk of the Senate’s internal economy committee. How long will it take for those details to be leaked, do you suppose?

But even without Wallin, there has been plenty to digest, courtesy of Mike Duffy and Mac Harb. Duffy has been the central figure in the affair until now, but Harb — the only Liberal in what would otherwise be an all-Tory show — has been making inroads.

Thanks to documents obtained by Postmedia News and reported by Jordan Press, we know details of an RCMP investigation into Harb’s claims for a housing allowance, even though he lived within a reasonable drive of the Senate.

A report by lead RCMP investigator Cpl. Greg Horton noted that Harb bought a home in Cobden, Ont. three months after he entered the Senate in 2003. Horton said Harb completely renovated the home, about 120 kilometres from Parliament Hill.

“By all accounts, that house was largely uninhabitable for the first (three) years that he owned it due to demolition and reconstruction,” Horton wrote.

A new drinking water well wasn’t installed until May, 2006, he said. Until then, “if the well couldn’t support a family, it is unlikely that Harb used it as a primary residence up to that time,” Horton wrote.

The RCMP documents also allege that Harb sold 99.99 per cent of the home in 2007 to the Brunei High Commissioner to Canada, though he continued to claim it as his primary residence. In 2011 he moved to Westneath, about 150 km from Parliament Hill. He sold that home recently.

Harb has a legal team working on his case, which noted that the Cobden allegations were unproven and contained only the RCMP’s side of the case. One of Harb’s lawyers told the Ottawa Citizen that his “enormous” legal costs was a major reason he borrowed $230,000 from an Ottawa businessman.

In another document obtained by Postmedia, the RCMP’s Cpl. Horton suggests that Mike Duffy “double dipped” repeatedly on expenses, billing the Senate for per diems and flights while he was away from Ottawa campaigning for Conservative candidates.

“I believe that Senator Duffy has demonstrated a pattern of filing fraudulent expense claims,” Horton writes in the document. “He submitted expense claims for Senate business to cover travel costs during the federal election campaign, and filed per diem claims for being in Ottawa for Senate business on days when he was actually campaigning in other parts of the country.”

The document indicates Duffy charged $86.35 a day in per diems and almost $6,000 in travel on days the Senate wasn’t sitting. At least twice he included charges for his wife, it says. Horton reports that, four days after the Senate revealed its investigation into housing allowance claims, Duffy switched the address of his personal bank account to an address in Prince Edward Island.

Now the Mounties are seeking details from Duffy’s personal bank accounts: the CIBC and Royal Bank will be asked to turn over details of his accounts and personal credit cards, and a mortgage application made in 2010 which relates to the location of his “primary residence.”

Postmedia reports:

Duffy, like other senators, has a Senate-issued American Express card, but Horton writes that Duffy used personal credit cards on multiple occasions for expenses he later claimed from the Senate. Horton claims the RCMP has identified 50 charges on two CIBC Visa credit cards that Duffy then expensed to the Senate, and two transactions related to travel during the 2011 election. An RBC Visa card was used for four trips Duffy then billed to the Senate, and 26 transactions related to his partisan activities during the campaign.

And that’s before we even get into the $90,000 cheque from Harper’s chief of staff, Nigel Wright, which led to Wright’s resignation. Wright has reportedly handed over hundreds of pages of documents that investigators are now sifting through.

It’s possible that Canadians aren’t paying much attention to this, given the summer lull and the public’s notoriously short attention span. But the red flag for the Tories lies in the evident diligence of the police investigation, and their apparent success at uncovering ever-more evidence of unsavoury activities. At some point the report will be made public and a response will be required. The damage from the Sponsorship scandal that sunk the Liberals wasn’t solely from the dirty deeds, but from voters’ view that the Liberal response wasn’t adequate.

Mr. Harper should best be readying his response now. When hurricanes hit, it’s too late to start making preparations.